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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26201275">Votive</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellida/pseuds/ellida'>ellida</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Death, Drowning, F/F, Hanging, Quynh | Noriko-centric, You're Welcome, additional violence, be the angst you want to see in the world, like really so much angst, mentions of suicidal ideation, no beta we die like quynh, repeated death of immortal character, that tag is the entire reason this fic is unbeta'd</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:27:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,681</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26201275</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellida/pseuds/ellida</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn’t even know how many times she’s drowned. Quỳnh’s never been one for numbers beyond the simple mathematics of <i>1 immortal warrior plus 1 arrow plus 1 arrow plus more arrows eventually equals A WHOLE DEAD ARMY</i>.</p><p>It’s definitely a lot, though.</p><p>Or: Death and the (Iron) Maiden times 500 years</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Andy | Andromache of Scythia &amp; Quynh | Noriko, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>66</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Votive</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I stumbled on <a href="https://www.trocadero.com/stores/pricelesspast/items/618155/Rare-Dong-Son-Culture-Votive-Bronze-Axe/enlargement3">this image</a> late at night, and then this fic wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it.</p><p>"Be the angst you want to see in the world" is a quote from the excellent @ellienchanted. </p><p>Most of the dialogue and action in the prison scene is taken directly from the movie.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>This is how drowning is.<br/>
<br/>
In the final moment before you drown, time slips and slithers and slides away from you. You know everything and nothing.<br/>
<br/>
Then it ends.<br/>
<br/>
And it begins again. You know nothing but the need for air, struggle flail gasp in water choke out a howling cry deadened by the dark sea. Chaos too deep for thought.<br/>
<br/>
Until that moment on the verge arises again. Elongates, splits into infinity. Images fractal before your eyes—ghosts, memories, dreams, prayers, curses—as you fall into the abyss, only to be reborn minutes later.<br/>
<br/>
Over and over and over again.<br/>
<br/>
This is how it is, Quỳnh learns. And relearns. And relearns.</p><p>***</p><p>
  <em>A small bronze axe twirls in the air, engraved pattern catching the sunlight and throwing it back in white-bright flashes.</em>
</p><p>***</p><p>You’d think the bottom of the sea would be peaceful.<br/>
<br/>
You’d be wrong.<br/>
<br/>
The bottom of the sea means a constant choking gasping desperate flailing pounding agony of <em>no air, no escape, let me out, let me out</em> that you can never quite stifle, no matter how many times you live it.<br/>
<br/>
Saltwater sears your nose and chokes your throat and scours your eyes. Eyes open, eyes closed, it makes no difference. Closed: the sea seeps between your lashes and invades. Open: the darkness presses down down down like the water.<br/>
<br/>
Your lungs fill to bursting, tight and heavy and nothing like relief.<br/>
<br/>
The only relief is in the moment before it ends, and it never lasts long enough.</p><p>***</p><p>
  <em>Andromache waits until the old priest has left the battlefield and re-entered his still-intact village before hefting one of the small bronze axes he left behind. She twirls it experimentally, grimaces as it begins to spin. Quỳnh knows what she’s thinking, as clearly as if Andromache had spoken. Not everyone has to fight with a labrys, but this? It’s impractically small—about the length of Andromache’s foot—and poorly balanced, light as a bundle of grass gathered for kindling. Shiny, though.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“No offense, Quỳnh, but if this is what your people are fighting with these days, it’s no wonder they need us to help beat back the Han.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Quỳnh snorts. The Tiếng Việt these villagers speak may be a strange cousin to her mother tongue, meaning fiendishly slippery to grasp after centuries away, but some things haven’t changed. “It’s not a weapon, Andromache. It’s a votive.”</em>
</p><p><em>“A votive?”</em> </p><p><em>“I think we’ve just joined another pantheon.”</em> </p><p>
  <em>Andromache tilts the blade, and sunlight dances on the patterned bronze. “What do you think we’re the patrons of this time?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“War, probably.” Quỳnh waves at the carnage around them. “Isn’t that what it always is?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I follow a woman halfway across the world to repel an invasion, and all I get is goddess of war? I must be losing my touch.”</em>
</p><p><em>Quỳnh rolls her eyes. “All hail Andromache of Scythia, the great goddess of fidelity, so loyal, so true. Modest, too.”</em> </p><p>
  <em>Andromache laughs and snakes her free arm around Quỳnh’s waist, pulling her in for a kiss, but when they break apart, Andromache’s eyes are deadly serious. “You know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, Quỳnh.”</em>
</p><p>***</p><p>That last moment before unconsciousness descends, though? It has a certain poetry and beauty to it, Quỳnh thinks. There’s a kind of peace that comes with surrendering to the inevitable, when time stretches and shivers against her eyelids, and an image floats up to her out of the darkness. Something that isn’t <em>I’m so fucking bored</em> or <em>get me out get me out get me out</em>.</p><p>Of course, she can’t always remember them from death to death. It takes a Herculean effort of will—though really, Hercules had nothing on Andromache in the old days, it should really be an Andromachean effort of will—to grasp a thought and cling tightly enough to it for it to follow her through unconsciousness and death and into her resurrection. Who knows how many times she’s had the same epiphanies?</p><p>Certainly not Quỳnh. She doesn’t even know how many times she’s drowned. Quỳnh’s never been one for numbers beyond the simple mathematics of <em>1 immortal warrior plus 1 arrow plus 1 arrow plus more arrows eventually equals A WHOLE DEAD ARMY.</em></p><p>It’s definitely a lot, though.</p><p>How many drownings equal a whole dead immortal? She supposes she’ll find out.</p><p>***</p><p>
  <em>Quỳnh doesn’t know how long Andromache’s been kneeling motionless beside Lykon’s grave mound, but she’s sure it’s been too long. And considering that Quỳnh counts her age in millennia now, she has a very generous definition of “too long.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Quỳnh crouches beside the slumped figure. “Andromache,” she says. “Andromache. Andromache.”</em>
</p><p><em>Andromache glances up, and her eyes are winter rain, bleak and desolate. Quỳnh holds her gaze.</em> </p><p>
  <em>“Just you and me,” she says and offers a hand.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Andromache’s eyes fill. She swallows hard, nods once, and takes Quỳnh’s outstretched hand.</em>
</p><p>***</p><p>You get used to anything. Except maybe drowning. Except then you get used to not being used to drowning and that has its own bleak familiarity.</p><p>The monotony of it is definitely the worst part of perpetual drowning. What Quỳnh wouldn’t give to be stabbed again, just once. Or shot, whether by arrows or guns, she’s not picky. Or hanged. Or poisoned, poisoning’s almost fun sometimes, cyanide is delicious, so nutty and sweet. Or even garroted, she’s only done that twice, it’d be a nice change.</p><p>One, two, into the Iron Maiden with you. Three, four, shut the door. Five, six, deep and dark as the Styx. Seven, eight…oh, thank the sky, here comes the darkness, here’s to hoping the rhyme is gone when she wakes up because drowning with an English nursery song stuck in her head on endless loop is just adding insult to injury.<br/>
<br/>
***</p><p>Quỳnh opens her eyes into the stinging salt darkness and hey! Here’s the panic: worn, familiar, somehow still new (even after all this time her lungs want to breathe and the squirming animal brain in the back of her skull wants to live) and yet not new (so deeply boringly not new). <em>No air, no escape, can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe</em>. Same old, same old.<br/>
<br/>
***</p><p>
  <em>It’s been over a week since their last death, and considering that Quỳnh has lost count of the number of times they’ve been hanged, this delay is not comforting. Their jailers must be planning something. Something new and certainly horrible.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She feels almost vindicated when she hears the guards outside their cell laughing about burning, though she tries not to listen too closely. Something something building the pyres right now, something something roast the witches like the animals they are, something something good riddance, something something keep your voice down, do you want to get hexed, Samuel?<br/>
<br/>
The footfalls fade away into nothingness like the deaths Quỳnh can’t die, but the words rattle in her skull.<br/>
<br/>
“I’ve never been burned alive before,” she says softly, and Andromache rouses herself enough to incline her head in Quỳnh’s direction. She doesn’t need to say, “I’m here, I’m listening.” She is, and Quỳnh knows it.</em>
</p><p><em>“What do you think it’s going to be like?”</em> </p><p>
  <em>The questions hangs in the air for a moment, just a moment, like her body on the gallows before Quỳnh wakes and the nightmare begins again.<br/>
</em>
</p><p><em>“Excruciating,” Andromache says, and she turns to meet Quỳnh’s eyes. Bloodied, bruised, bone-weary, exhausted from death after death, and she’s still the most beautiful thing Quỳnh’s ever seen. </em> </p><p><em>Andromache’s eyes light as they meet Quỳnh’s, and she laughs softly, more breath than sound, and Quỳnh can’t stand how much she loves that laugh. She loves it so much she’s going to shake out of her skin, so much she has to turn away.</em> </p><p>
  <em>Away was a bad idea. Away holds no comfort. Away is burning—probably excruciating—and whatever comes after that—probably more excruciating. On and on and on. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>But they’ve faced excruciating before.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Quỳnh turns back, the old refrain springing to her tongue. “Just you and me?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Andromache huffs and shakes her head—as if to say, “Really? You have to ask?—but her eyes meet Quỳnh’s fiercely.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Until the end,” she vows, and her gaze is a strong embrace where Quỳnh could stay forever.</em>
</p><p>***</p><p>That wasn’t the nightmare, Quỳnh thinks dimly as her limbs flail against the night-dark sea. This is.</p><p>***</p><p>Five minutes of unconscious oblivion, and then she’s back!</p><p>Yes, the worst part of perpetual drowning is the monotony.</p><p>That’s a lie. The worst part is knowing that Andromache is out there somewhere, suffering and dying dying dying, just like Quỳnh. Maybe burning and rising from the ashes and burning again, like a phoenix. Maybe locked inside her own iron coffin, pitched into a different lonely ocean.</p><p>The one thing Quỳnh knows is that Andromache hasn’t escaped yet either. Because if she had, nothing would keep her from Quỳnh.</p><p>“Until the end,” Andromache said. And Andromache is nothing if not faithful. She has the axe to prove it.</p><p>***</p><p>In between her body’s exhausted, frantic efforts not to do what it’s just done uncountable times in a row, Quỳnh hatches a plan. Well. It’s not much of a plan, not like the elaborate battlefield strategies she used to execute, but it’s as much of a plan as she can make while her body dies around her and the angry sea rushes in.<br/>
<br/>
<em>Batter her way free, then save Andromache.</em> Whatever it takes. However long it takes. Until the end.</p><p>Quỳnh wrestles her reflexes for control and wins. She scrabbles against the lid of her prison with fingers and toes until she finds the upper and lower hinges, then delivers them shattering blows.<br/>
<br/>
Shattering to her feet and hands, that is. The iron doesn’t break so easily. At least, not yet.<br/>
<br/>
But one day it will. If Quỳnh can just remember the plan the next time she wakes. And the time after that. And the time after that. And the—</p><p>***</p><p>There’s a trick to remembering, Quỳnh has learned. When the water recedes and your mind goes calm and still, you cling tight to the image you want to carry with you. You give it an anchor in your body. You intertwine your fingers, clench them tight and wedge them with your chin against the hinge of your coffin. You think, <em>this is Andromache’s hand in my hand, where it will be once the hinge breaks. Andromache needs me. Andromache. Andromache.</em></p><p>You repeat the words, over and over, until the darkness claims you.</p><p>And if you’re lucky, they will be there for you when you wake, a compass star to follow with whatever scraps of mind you can claw away from the panic. A hinge to batter over and over. An escape route to open, bloodied fist by bloodied fist. A rescue to accomplish.</p><p>But if they’re not there, don’t worry. Andromache is the best part of your heart. Her face comes back and back and back to you. You’ll remember her eventually.</p><p>You always do.</p><p>***</p><p>
  <em>A sad-eyed man in blue with a noose around his neck shivers on a scaffold. Snow catches in his hair and eyelashes.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He swings a sad and listless arc through the wind and falling ice.</em>
</p><p>***</p><p>Quỳnh wakes gasping, remembering how it felt to hang, and gets two lungfuls of icy water for her trouble.<br/>
<br/>
***</p><p>
  <em>The man’s body dangles, buffeted by the wind, one slowly effacing spot of color in the white and whitening landscape.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>His eyes blink open and stare straight into hers.</em>
</p><p>***</p><p>“Andromache! There’s another one!” Quỳnh yells, or tries to, before the inward rush of brine chokes it off, and she remembers. Andromache. The iron coffin. The hinge.</p><p>There’s nothing she can do for the new immortal here. Once she’s found Andromache, they’ll collect him together. Unless Yusuf and Nicolò beat them there. Yusuf and Nicolò. How far they’ve come since—no, Quỳnh, focus. The hinge. The hinge.</p><p>***</p><p>
  <em>The sad-eyed man twists and gyrates in the wind, hands scrabbling at the noose around his neck.</em>
</p><p><em>He falls to the snow-covered planks below, then scrambles down from the scaffold and immediately stumbles into the snow.<br/>
<br/>
</em>***</p><p>But of course the man with sad eyes keeps intruding into her dreams, shattering her focus, battering her already-battered memory. Quỳnh can’t decide whether she’s annoyed that sometimes she wakes so confused that she flails her way into that floating, time-stopped place without having struck a single intentional blow or grateful for the novelty of memories she’s never lived and sights she’s never seen.</p><p>Both, she decides. Both.</p><p>***</p><p><em>The sad man slumps against an outcropping of rock, heedless of the meager protection it provides from the howling blizzard.<br/>
<br/>
A figure ducks through the curtain of ice and towers over him. Dark wool coat and a silly hat, plume now rimed and ragged with frost, above blue eyes Quỳnh would know anywhere.<br/>
<br/>
“Sébastien,” Andromache says. “It’s about time.” She removes her ridiculous hat and plunks it on the sad man’s shivering head.</em><br/>
<br/>
***</p><p>Quỳnh wakes feeling such deep, boneless relief that she can almost forget she’s drowning. Almost.<br/>
<br/>
Andromache. Andromache’s free. Andromache’s escaped her own prison, whatever it was. She doesn’t need Quỳnh to save her, after all. After all, she’s older than Quỳnh, more experienced, wise and wily, and she’s beaten them all. She’s free, walking through the world in such a thoroughly terrible hat that Quỳnh’s never going to stop mocking her for it as soon as she’s free herself.</p><p>Which won’t be long now because there is no power under the sky that can keep Andromache from her side. There is nothing she wouldn’t do for Quỳnh.<br/>
<br/>
***</p><p>
  <em>An icy, rough-paved road. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Sébastien stumbles over the uneven stones, his ankle crumbling sideways. “Merde.”<br/>
<br/>
A familiar arm in a now-familiar dark gray sleeve hauls him upright. </em>
</p><p><em>“God damn it, I told you, if you can’t say it in Russian, don’t say it at all,” Andromache hisses into his ear.<br/>
<br/>
</em>***</p><p>Except that Andromache’s not actually at Quỳnh’s side. She’s at this Sébastien’s side, steering him through an icy Russian winter, while Quỳnh drowns again and again in the icy sea. Alone.<br/>
<br/>
***<em><br/>
</em></p><p>
  <em>“I still don’t understand why you’re doing this.” Sébastien’s voice is plaintive.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Andromache’s labrys flashes out and severs his head from his shoulders. Body and head fall in a graceful arc, then rise again.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Whoa,” Sébastien cowers backwards, clutching his throat. “Whoa, whoa, whoa—what just happened?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Andromache wipes her blade clean without looking up, gore staining the snow at her feet. “I told you. You’re one of us. Immortal.” Her voice is impossibly weary.</em>
</p><p>***</p><p>Of course Andromache had to go for Sébastien, Quỳnh tells herself firmly. He’s brand new, scared and confused, like Lykon when they found him, like Yusuf and Nicolò. And he can help Andromache search.</p><p>Never mind that any years spent tracking Sébastien are years that Quỳnh’s spent drowning and drowning and drowning again. Maybe Andromache thinks his link to Quỳnh will help. Quỳnh can’t really see how—surely her patch of seabed is much like all the others, cold, dark, salty, check check check—but it’s hard to hold a coherent thought in her head when her body insists on constantly fighting for air that isn’t coming, so she might have missed something. She’ll trust Andromache’s judgment.</p><p>Because Andromache is on her way. She is. She is. She is.</p><p>***</p><p>It’s taking her a very long time, though.<br/>
<br/>
But any amount of time seems endless when you’re measuring in three-minute increments. And when those minutes are somehow both boring and excruciating.</p><p>***</p><p>
  <em>A narrow bustling street, crammed with people and carts and horses.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Sébastien pushes his way through the crowd, making his way towards a white-washed door.</em>
</p><p><em>“Papa!” The door flies open, and a small boy runs to fling himself into Sébastien’s arms. “Papa, you came back!”</em> </p><p><em>Sébastien buries his face in the boy’s sandy curls, heedless of the squawks and jostling elbows of the passers-by. His voice is rough. “Of course I did, Jean-Pierre. I could never leave you.”</em> </p><p>
  <em>No sign of Andromache.</em>
</p><p>***</p><p>Any minute now, Quỳnh tells herself. Andromache’s absence from Quỳnh’s dreams of Sébastien is a good sign. It means that Andromache got Sébastien out, got whatever she needed from him, got him back to his family, and now she’s on her way back to Quỳnh. Her family.<br/>
<br/>
All Quỳnh has to do is wait.</p><p>And wait she does. She stops battering the hinges quite as frenetically, sometimes letting her reflexes take control for a whole drowning cycle (or two or three or maybe fifty, numbers still aren’t her strong suit) while she drifts as much as she can between memory and dream and anticipation.</p><p>***<br/>
<br/>
It’s a shock when her dreams of Sébastien stop being of simple, homely things—children playing, strong young men laughing, emaciated middle-aged men coughing their lungs out in sickbeds, not always cheerful, but always sunlit, always less desolate than the ocean floor—and turn to flashes of battle. Even more of a shock when Quỳnh starts catching glimpses of familiar faces again. First, Yusuf brushing Nicolò’s hair out of his eyes as they crouch beside Sébastien behind a wall, bodies and weapons tensed expectantly. (For what? An ambush? A signal?) Then, several dreams later, Andromache deflecting a hail of bullets with a twirling axe.</p><p>Whatever they’re doing, Quỳnh never doubts that they’re coming for her. Andromache wouldn’t have it any other way.<br/>
<br/>
Sometimes, Quỳnh tries to spin the fragments she sees into the threads that lead to her rescue. Maybe Andromache’s figured out where Quỳnh is and needs every pair of hands to crew the boat, but there’s a war or five in between them.</p><p>Quỳnh can’t quite see the pattern, but she reminds herself that that’s to be expected when fragmented dreams of Sébastien are all that she has to go on. Someday soon, Andromache will explain it all to her.</p><p>Quỳnh can’t quite see the pattern, but she’s a little bit preoccupied with the unbearable boredom of drowning.</p><p>Quỳnh can’t quite see the pattern until she can.<br/>
<br/>
***</p><p><em>A flash of striated cave walls, weapons and artifacts and trunks and miscellanea heaped haphazardly. Just a flash, but Quỳnh would know those walls anywhere.<br/>
<br/>
Sébastien and three others sprawl in a loose circle, laughing. A motley assortment of three cups and a whole bottle, raised and clinking. The curve of Andromache’s throat as the bottle’s contents pour down. </em> </p><p>
  <em>Over Andromache’s shoulder, that silly plumed hat from the blizzard perches atop two small turquoised axe hafts. The hat is ragged and ridiculous as before, but now it’s moth-eaten, rimed with decades of dust and grit instead of snow.</em>
</p><p>***<br/>
<br/>
A dusty hat atop two ancient blue bronze axes. It’s nothing. A flash of a dream, a fragment of a cave she once discovered, a man she’s never met drinking with people she knows well. But that’s all it takes.</p><p>A dusty hat atop two ancient blue bronze axes. It’s everything.<br/>
<br/>
Quỳnh <em>knows</em>.</p><p>***<br/>
<br/>
Quỳnh intends to lie down (well, she’s technically been lying down for who knows how many years, but this time she means to choose it) and wait for death to claim her. Like she did so long ago before Andromache found her, dying death after death in the scorching desert sun. She did it before. She can do it again.<br/>
<br/>
Except that thirst is slower and gentler than drowning’s harsh embrace, and Quỳnh’s lungs brain arms legs won’t let her surrender. Except that Quỳnh was young then, not even two hundred yet. Except that she’s died, quite literally, millions of times since she left that desert at Andromache’s side and knows just how many more deaths might be waiting ahead of her.<br/>
<br/>
Except that now Quỳnh knows she isn’t the only one, and that knowledge is everything, has always been everything. No, Andromache has always been everything, the way Quỳnh has always known that she’s everything to Andromache.<br/>
<br/>
Except that she isn’t, and maybe she never was. She’s been forgotten, erased beneath the waves, like an axe blade beneath a ridiculous hat.</p><p>But not for long. Not if she can help it.</p><p>Quỳnh gropes with her toes for the lower hinge. <em>Batter her way free, then save Andromache.</em> The first step of the plan hasn’t changed.</p><p>She smashes a kick against it, savoring the familiar pop and twang of dislocated toes realigning. Only the endgame is different.</p><p>***</p><p>There’s a trick to remembering, Quỳnh has learned. When the water recedes and your mind goes calm and still, you cling tight to the image you want to carry with you. You give it an anchor in your body. You grind your knee into the hinge of your coffin, wedge it with your body so it can’t fall away with your consciousness. You think, <em>the hinge is an axe-head, my knee is a terrible hat. Axe-head. Hat. Axe-head. Hat.</em></p><p>It doesn’t actually matter that the two things have no inherent connection. There are no connections in an iron coffin on the seabed. You are alone, alone, alone as you always were—ahem. What matters is that you repeat them, over and over, until the darkness claims you.</p><p>And if you’re lucky, they will be there for you when you wake. Your star chart, handing you escape route and purpose at once: broken hinge leads to vengeance, one-two, easy easy.</p><p>But if they’re not there, don’t worry. You dream of Sébastien often. You’ll remember eventually.</p><p>You always do.</p><p>***</p><p>
  <em>Bang. Bang. Bang.</em>
</p><p>Her knees are axe hafts. Her fists are blades. Quỳnh shatters her bones against the hinges over and over again. She clings tight to the image—<em>axe hafts and blades—</em>as she sinks down into the dark, willing it to be there for her when she resurfaces.<br/>
<br/>
<em>Bang. Bang. Bang.</em></p><p>One day, the hinges will give way.<br/>
<br/>
And on that day, she’ll be ready. Ready to surface and fill her lungs with air for the first time in so very many of her lifetimes. Ready to find Andromache. Ready to find an axe and sink it into Andromache’s skull, over and over and over again. Unceasingly. Eternally. As many times as it takes. One last offering for the goddess of betrayal.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Is "One Two Buckle My Shoe" anachronistic by several centuries and an entire continent? Yes, yes, it is. </p><p>Did that stop me from using it? FUCK NO IT DID NOT.</p><p>Also, if you'd like a visual of Andy's ridiculous hat, I'm picturing the headgear that all of the Imperial Russian Army foot soldiers are wearing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Russian_Army#/media/File:Ermolov-borodino.jpg">here</a>. Andy has the version with the black plume, obviously.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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